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Monday, December 22, 2014

I have
always wanted to write at some length about the three extraordinary sequences
that Lee Harwood published in his book Morning
Light 1998, and, of course, collected again in Collected Poems (from which book, as I opened it to check details,
a postcard from Lee, featuring an Atget photograph of a Corsetiere, fell; what can he have been trying to
tell me?). So here goes. It builds on the briefer descriptions of this trio posted
here. It follows on from my review of the 2014 book The Orchid Boat here, itself part of prefatory work for an article provisionally entitled '"Now Put it Together": Lee Harwood and the Gentle Art of Collage'.

Lee Harwood dreaming of Armenia

‘Dreams
of Armenia’
presents the history of a near-forgotten genocide. Lyric interludes are
truncated by ‘information(s)’. For me, the most resonant lines in the whole of
Harwood’s oeuvre are the tender but
chilling: ‘They would do this to you, my love,/ and to our son,’ (Harwood 2004,
444), compounding horror across the line-break; the lines rest alongside grim
enumerations of ‘Massacres, shootings, bayoneting, hacking….’ (Harwood 2004,
444) Harwood has commented on the poem: ‘that poem is more a praise of Armenia and the Armenia I imagine,’ but – as ever –
history keeps breaking in, literally, with more dates and bald grim facts than
you find in a Reznikoff or John Seed poem. (Harwood and Corcoran 2008, 94) And
the ‘Armenian song that tears your heart’ (441) or the lovemaking ‘in the hot
night lying together’ cannot altogether obviate the terror, but then that is
the point of the juxtapositions. (443) The changing ‘frames’ are like the
mythical (and not so mythical) knock on the door in the middle of the night: ‘a
silence. a door bangs in the wind./ not a dream.’ (444) These lines are
ambiguous (given that the poem promises ‘dreams’ of Armenia as a positive); the poem’s
delights are poised on the edge of terror. ‘“Who remembers the Armenians?” said
Hitler years later as he set on the Jews.’ (444) He didn’t ‘say’; he asked. And
one unscheduled answer to his rhetorical question is: Lee Harwood, and through Harwood,
you (and me). Us. We remember. The poem is, in fact, a love poem, as
contextualized by fact and ‘information’ in its way as the magnificent as ‘The
Long Black Veil’ of the 1970s. These lovers are no longer young; they, too,
have ‘history’: ‘Your long black hair, an occasional grey hair,/ your deep
brown eyes that churn my heart.’ (442)

‘The Songs for
Those Who Are On The Sea of Glass’ features fragmented accounts of a very literal
assault upon the heart, a heart attack, which ends with the startling sonic
patterning of: ‘sat up in bed in bizarre pyjamas’, (Harwood 2004: 449) which
signals the narrator’s sudden release from the glass sea ‘of being dead and
being brought back into what suddenly seemed like an amazing world’, in
Harwood’s later commentary (he admits to being ‘happy’ with that marvellous
last line too). (Harwood and Corcoran 2008, 94) Between sections which register
the quality of light in the ward and the ‘The ice window’ of death – ‘(that’s a
metaphor)’ (447) a typical parenthesis reminds us, Harwood remains ever-suspicious
of language, even as in another mood (which corresponds to another section) he
quotes Mandelstam’s depiction of the human universe as ‘the happy heaven’.
(446) But the intrusions of involuntary memory whether of ‘Jamaican cigars long
ago’ (446) or of a trip across the literal ice of Esbjerg erupt with hopeful
imaginings: ‘Inland a fox trotted nervously/ across snow-covered fields and
streams’, we read, a scenario that, with titles like Crossing the Frozen River and HMS
Little Fox in Harwood’s back catalogue, let alone all the positive
references to the solitary migratory habits of the fox (contrast that with the wolves we find in Barry MacSweeney!),
suggests a validation of transitory movement from one ‘frame’ to another (to
use William Rowe’s phrase for Harwood’s shiftology). (I stole that word from a
book Patricia is reading; it seems apposite.) ‘“The monster! The monster!”
fleeing villagers yell/ in black and white Transylvania’ is Harwood’s comic way
of mediating ‘a body stitched and wired together’, (448) a reference to the
early (and now unconvincing) Frankenstein
films, and as ever the deflationary kitsch deflection unsettles the tone,
as does his ‘To walk at ease with the ghosts/ (not a club member yet)’, (449) a
late instance of what Geoffrey Ward recognised in early Harwood as ‘an
importation into experience of a tonal innocence which is recognized as true to
life, but which in the new setting of the page must henceforth wear invisible
quotation marks’, though in this poem we are guided by the parentheses. (Ward
2007: 37) As Harwood remarks somewhere, the cliché is only too true. Too true. One section reads simply:
‘Talking in code?’ the question mark deflecting again absolute judgement.
Clichés and metaphors, sections and poems, even fragmented and multifaceted
ones, may be yet speaking in a cipher, and this is a characteristic poetic
questioning of the medium of poetry, on Harwood’s part.

The 50 short sections of
‘Days and Nights’ (some of them single lines, like the self-interrogative one
in ‘The Songs’) reflect Harwood’s brief employment as a museum attendant (they
were ‘written’ in Harwood’s head). They range from single word entries, such as
‘(space)’ (Harwood 2004:421), which attempts to look outwards, and
‘sullen’ (Harwood 2004: 422) which looks inwards, to meditations on their own
development; one explains Harwood’s frequent preference for gerund forms
throughout his work: they leave the utterance ‘always in the presentinging’. (Harwood 2004: 421) There is nothing quite as minimal as this in
Harwood’s work, although he refers to Raworth’s serial composition ‘Stag Skull Mounted’
(1970), from which it quotes, commenting on its own failure of method, or
failure as method: ‘As Tom once wrote
“this trick doesn’t work”.’ (Harwood 2004: 422) ‘The line that says nothing. A
chair creaks,’ in fact says quite a lot about how ‘one thought fills immensity’
as Blake puts it, (419) though ‘stuck in the fact of absence’ doesn’t quite
suggest the zen-like calm of meditation. Structurally, ‘Days and Nights’
testifies to the continuing influences of Ashbery’s ‘Europe’, and to the
miniature box-sculptures of Joseph Cornell, to whom the piece is dedicated, the
constructor of his own ‘poetic enactments’ as Dore Ashton calls his famous boxes.
(Ashton 1974: 1) We are left, as it were, peering into the miniature but
expansive interiors of his assemblages in the final ‘accidental sighting’, as
these texts are subtitled: ‘The white box contains a landscape.’ (423) The
smaller we go: the more the find. Cornell was first excited by the ‘splice of
life of collage’ as Waldrop calls it – he was untrained and could not draw –
when he saw Max Ernst’s work, but it was later with his friend Marcel Duchamp
that he ‘shared … a love for sudden juxtapositions, of perfectly ordinary and
even vulgar objects. But seashells, pressed flowers, and butterflies were in
the final analysis closer to Cornell’s vision than were Duchamp’s ironies’, as
Ashton explains. (Ashton 1974: 77). Cornell preferred what she calls the
bric-a-brac of ‘Victoriana or Americana’
of which Cornell was an obsessive collector. (Ashton 1974: 74) Harwood’s
attitude to literary collage is similar to this cabinet of curiosities
approach, closer to the juxtapositions of the Victorian commonplace book than
to those of William Burroughs or Dada-period Tzara.

A final thought
(after, or rather, during, a late
afternoon walk down the Allerton Road where I bought a novel, The Director’s Cut,by Nicholas Royle, which was priced £1 and
which the charity shop wanted to charge me 29p for – and I refused, giving them
the pound that was already a markdown, but it was an appropriate find, since
Lee is a walk-on character in Nick’s latest novel, First Novel): amid the syntactic and rhythmical restlessness of
Harwood’s work, between the shifting ‘scenes’ of the clusters of fragments in
the narrative, there is a singular voice (that is not to be confused with its variable
‘tone’, as some commentators have noted), a set of concerns and a way of saying
them that is – whatever the formal or narrative guise – immediately
recognisable as ‘Harwood’, and quite unique. It is an undamaged fragility, a
quiet determination to uphold eros
and agape against the forces of
destruction and negativity, a polyphony to undermine the stomping boots of the
military marching song, a bit of camp (or the occasional kitsch ‘bad’ line)
thrown in to unsettle the certainties of received discriminations in life and
in the arts.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

And here and here are parts one and two of a review of his Collected Poems. Perhaps best read before the Stride review. See Enitharmon's announcement of, and extract from, my review here. And, oddly, the review again, here.

I had a strange thought working on Lee Harwood's work: during the time I write about him, I kind of feel that I am in communication with the man himself. I mean this literally. In periods of work I don't feel the necessity to phone him or write to him, and it's a surprise to find that I haven't, because I feel it's already happening. Perhaps it's a personal by-product of an effect William Rowe describes in his Three Lyric Poets: 'When Harwood explores intimacies of feeling almost too delicate for the
voice to sustain, he deploys the hesitancies and gaps of everyday speech, the
places where meaning breaks down into the sheer lapse of lived time.’ (Rowe
2009: 7)

There is an interview with Kelvin Corcoran here about the book (though I only found it after reviewing it).

Friday, December 19, 2014

Included in this issue: An exclusive interview with Jerome
Rothenberg by Ariel Resnikoff. Reviews of Geoffrey Hill, Carol Watts and D.S.
Marriott. Poems from Chris McCabe, Manoel de Barros, John James, Jana
Bodnárová, Alvin Pang and much more. See here.

Christopher Middleton

This issue also contains my piece ‘Artifice and Artificers: The Meaning of Form in
the work of Christopher Middleton’, formerly an excerpt from my book The Meaning of Form (for which I have a firm publisher), and now an outtake, or more practically, a separate essay
of its own and, I hope, a useful account of the work of this major writer. Read the whole essay here. Oliver Dixon has some nice things to say about it here.

An introduction to The Meaning of Form and links to its formative pieces see here.

A Wolf interview with me, conducted by Chris Madden may be read here. I'm thinking of including this in my selected poems, History or Sleep.

Having
successfully completed a BA (Hons) Creative Writing and English at Edge Hill, I
continued on to study the MA Creative Writing with a focus on poetry. I chose
to continue at Edge Hill to further the study of innovative poetries, and
poetics, which I had begun to explore, both from a literary critical and to
drive my writing practice, during the BA. During my MA, I was joint winner of
the inaugural Rhiannon Evans Poetry Scholarship 2010. From Parts Becoming Whole
(The Knives Forks Spoons Press, 2011) is my first collection of poetry and came
directly out of the poetry written during the MA. Towards the end of my MA I
became a member of the Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge Hill. I went
on to be winner of Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize 2012, my pamphlet Maps and Love Songs for
Mina Loy is published Seren.

Working
with the poet Philip Davenport (as ‘Arthur and Martha’) introduced me to using
experimental poetry and visual art in community projects. I have led a series
of ‘poetry as reminiscence’ workshops in the community which involved using
experimental poetry writing techniques with older people. I have had my poetry
and reviews published in various magazines and journals and have presented
papers on my work at conferences. I am currently undertaking creative writing
practice-led research at Edge Hill University investigating the idea of
‘multi-voice lyric’ in contemporary innovative poetry. Alongside this I have
taught undergraduate 1st and 3rd year poetry (and fiction) modules at Edge Hill. I have
continued to read my work most recently at the Blue Bus reading series in
London with Robert Hampson and Elaine Randell, at Storm and Sky with Rhys
Trimble in Liverpool and at Peter Barlow’s Cigarette in Manchester with Lucy
Burnett, Nathan Thompson and Steve Spence.

Poetics

I
am drawn to poetry in which sound manifests as the dominant textual register.
Modernist poetry and innovative or experimental modern poetries are where my
passions and inspirations are fired.

My
own poetry explores how sound aspects of language are intrinsic in poetic
compositional processes and how this shapes the resultant poem. My poetics are
a work in progress, especially at this point when I am developing that
alongside experimenting in my creative work. As part of my current research I
am experimenting in writing poetry which explores possibilities for polyphony
and rhythms of identities. For this I am using Bakhtin’s ideas about dialogisms
applied to poetry and drawing on Julia Kristeva’s ideas, in particular about
language and the maternal body in exploring possibilities for dialogisms
between speech and the female body. This writing is entering the arena of
complex dialogic relations between variously endophonic and exophonic
assemblages of sound sequences.

To
me, poetry embodies an openness to otherness, is an active seeking after the
unknown for the experience (and pleasure) of journeying (in words) rather than
for the closure of arriving at an end point. It is open to possibilities and
doesn’t use language to silence the other, rather, because it is not afraid of
difference or not knowing, it encourages interactions and proliferations which
serve only to extend and enrich the work. Poetry is painting with words, is
mapping sounds into rhythms on the pages in endless combinations. Writing
poetry allays my own fears of being unanswered. Poetry enables me to see
(versions of) myself. Writing poetry is a release for some of the psychic
energy which otherwise has me blowing light bulbs!

Thursday, December 11, 2014

The US Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence report (read here) confirmed what many suspected. To 'commemorate' that event, by ordinary rendition, here are some poems from Warrant Error (see more here about this book of mine).

Dissensus-uncensored citizens their post-fluidarity

Jams the geodesic sepulchres of GCHQ

The ballet of chatter threatens the iron triangle

A-theism in-corporates the earth’s blown powder

But resistance to existential terror within

Microquakes at neo-feudal controls

Quivers flesh contra the Universal Event

Military ground aches with mediatized Odes

While secular fatwas begin the law of rules

Territorialized apostrophes in the dead mouths of victors

We are in love with Eros and you with a suitcase

Dirty device crafted by cells O! new

Selves unresolved on a new war footing

Self-made utopiasdraped in black

Self-othering hood Klans one’s unbecoming

the obsolete body art of choreographed excess

a video diary that couldn’t care more or less

Floating on flesh-hooks in betweenness aloft

who licks the blinding gusset of combat knickers

kicks a pile of fleshly rags shovelled by rubber-

necking rednecks? Instead of thumbprints

they press sweat-stains into the dustiest corners.

A body regime splintered by such loving

inhabits what it shall never possess

A barbed obscenity haunts for an extra ear

the parasitic cyborg whose hearts and minds

surrender to the body’s self-absorption.

Under the hood maggots nest like emotion

Black night stiffens the resolve of the window.

Wipe-out rain, a bad sound effect of rain, white-

noises your voices out, rustles up a simpler sound

of God’s brass neck talking through His hat

Your ruffled reflection raises the ethical question

as you paste words like ‘author’ and ‘authority’

on the board beyond this screen of your becoming

Wind, though outside, sheers your breath away.

On a traffic island in Hardman St., a kneeler torches the night

in Guantánamo orange, grizzled by a protestant cloud.

Police rush on in yellow. Fleshing blue lights on cars

parked as barriers breed darkness in the dark

Smack a lip or two, ruddied up, roughed up for a smile.

Tonight, Condoleezza Rice is being entertained

The foreign secretary, spotting bare-headed top brass,

swipes the tin hat from his head as he follows

down the steps to Iraq’s soft tarmac the secretary of
state’s smile

that’s clammed to her face like a category mistake

that dropped down one floor in the lift and emerged

a changeling into the roar of a canvas wind.

Celebrity murderess heads off to a fresh beheading.

Elegant heels lift slender ankles, where he follows

Yawning policewomen guard the spaces in Liverpool

she leaves, a line of orange cones elisions in her diary

Her brain barks orders like a sea captain during desertion.

Abu Ghraib grey ocean lips sharp-toothed cliffs brushed by
sun.

The mutineers have taken the dormitory.

As their voices fall asleep, they murmur against her

A tall man came to their door an

Instance of polite rendition

She was in a loose dressing gown he

Could see a strap it was

The wrong hotel between the killings

Kaleidoscope reassembled history

Moved ‘inevitably’ towards

Warrantless wiretaps and zap the road

To Damascus
was shelled every day

He stuck his fingers in a bag of salt

Zawahiri had them shot filmed it

Following a script

Provided by their enemies they dropped

Leaflets on fields of perfumed martyred corpses

Self-protection
was self-consumption scared

Or sacred
it’s eased into the holiest story

A sonnetized
account with the biggest screen test

Local colour
was masked by raw

Overheads and
the heresy was mere hearsay

When
evidently witless their mouths agape they rose

At bungled
bugle-blasts jamming Agape and Eros

In the ballad
of the blade she bites him

Obliged
attack he shoots mightily back in

Terror or
error she tries to send the message

From
compassion back to passion

She writes
releases for rouged regimes

When she’s
finished she pulls the plug

And he spills
the viscous liquid for her

Read Alan Baker's review of Warrant Errorhere. And more of these 'sonnets' here.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

It is with great sadness that I'm announcing that Dinesh
Allirajah, creative writing associate tutor at Edge Hill, died yesterday from
complications following surgery.

Dinesh was a well-known writer in the North West (but particularly in Liverpool) having
published many short stories, anthologies and poetry, some it jazz poetry. He worked with us at Edge Hill and also at UClan.

He'd worked for some years at Edge Hill and is much loved
by his students and colleagues alike. Dinesh leaves behind two sons, 10 and 12,
their mother and his partner Vicky.

I had just linked this blog to his, where he was wittily blogging about hospitalisation but also about 'Real Time Stories'.

More here. And here. And a video clip here. See his published work here. As I blog this I am listening to a compilation of live Miles Davis tracks. A great jazz fan, and jazz poet, Dinesh might have liked that. Only Miles could make a track called 'What's New?' sound so appropriately sad. And bleak.

Dinesh's funeral took place on Monday 22 December at Springwood Crematorium, Springwood Avenue, Garston, Liverpool L25 7UN. It was a sombre but celebratory ceremony, ending with Martha Reeves singing Heatwave. An obituary has been published in The Guardian here.

FURTHER UPDATE: There was an evening event to celebrate the life and work of Dinesh Allarajah at the Bluecoat in Liverpool on 6th May 2015. See here.

Monday, December 08, 2014

I am sad to
have heard this morning officially of the death of Geoffrey Soar from his wife
Valerie, though I had picked up the news in one of Lawrence Upton’s updates, and I find Ken
Edwards has posted a remark on Facebook. He had been ill for some years.

Indefatigable
supporters of radical poetry both, the Soars were often met at readings, events
and parties (including ours) in 1990s London.
Geoffrey had semi-retired, I think, then, from his post of librarian at the
Little Magazine and Small Press Collection at University College London, a
resource absolutely vital for tracing the history of innovative poetry in the
Twentieth Century. He published and exhibited at least the following:

Little
Magazines Exhibition Geoffrey Soar Published by University
College London, 1967

"Joyce and the Joyceans: an
exhibition compiled by Geoffrey Soar and Richard Brown" (1982).

Geoffrey
Soar and RJ Ellis, ‘Little Magazines in the British Isles
Today’, British Book News (December 1983), pp. 728-33

David
Miller and Geoffrey Soar, Little Magazines and How They Got That Way,
Exhibition Guide, 27 September-25 October 1990, Royal Festival Hall, London, draws on the Little Magazine Collection at University College,
London, started
by Soar and maintained by Miller.

Interaction
& Overlap: From the Little Magazine and Small Press Collection at University College
London Miller, David and Geoffrey Soar London:
Workfortheeyetodo, 1994.

Wolfgang
Gőrtschacher, Little Magazine Profiles (Saltzburg: University of
Saltzburg, 1993) is a full length study of the phenomenon of little magazines
which owes to Geoffrey and features a full length interview with him.

Geoffrey
was also a painter and Writers Forum will be publishing some work of his soon. Our thoughts are with Valerie.

Friday, December 05, 2014

Slow
cruel
hands of time
there is snow
on the ground
slightly cut off
the trains still
run just
is there a ghost in my house?
I could sleep
across tramlines
on a £67.26 bike
Danish coffee
Danish pastries
the smell of the sea
in the air
before redevelopment
crushed the soul
out of the city
and squeezed it into
glossy magazines
seek the independent
taste the double shot
walk the hill
Neon glasses say it all
especially at dusk
when the mist rises
slowly through
streets like lace
there is the need
to home
to ground
amongst the bags
the belt buckle tightens
another notch
it must be the soup
Granite walls
the private dock
summer sense of calm
within the grounds
there are ruins
in the fridge there
are cans of Coca-Cola
Elderflower presse
and San Miguel
she complains about
the size of her hands
blue plaster
blue jeans
flat white
almost a perfect leaf
the comfort
of a dusty kneeler
extinguished candles
at dusk
A55
right through
start in one country
exit in another
pacing
call
pace
calling
battlements harbour walls
the overwhelming sense
of history
pebbles washed up
bring their own tales
strings and choirs
returning estuary
beyond home
take the old road
you will find the oak
kites on the sand
if you go far enough west
the signal reads Ireland
choirs and strings
solo against treated string
look left
as if perched on a hill
it is there
arms wrapped around
the port
another return
to face through
darkness aware
of hidden landscape
routine is played
movement
through necessity
it sounds as though
it was recorded
in the largest
of cathedrals
what is a cathedral
if it is not
a home?
the goodness of warmth
hot coffee
regardless of location
to get aside
to listen

My
relationship with Edge Hill is long and varied. A graduate of the BA in English
and MA in Creative Writing, I gained a PhD under the supervision of Robert
Sheppard. I was a founder member of the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research
Group.

I now teach English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.